It is a common practice in many large stores for purchases to be made on the basis of stock items on display in the store. The buyer selects his purchase, pays the sales person and receives a sale record. This record is then taken to a central supply counter where an item corresponding to that purchased is recovered from the store warehouse. With conventional sales records, anyone gaining access to blank sales record paper, which is often little more than a roll of plain paper, can print their own sales record and use it to claim any desired item at the supply counter. Each year many thousands of dollars worth of merchandise are stolen in this way. A further variation of this scheme is used where payment for the goods is made at the supply counter. A fraudulently printed sales record is used to obtain the item for an amount significantly lower than its actual retail price in the store.
Another fraudulent means of using illegally printed sales records involves using such a record to "legitimize" disposal of stolen merchandise. Using the record the stolen goods are "returned" to a retailer in exchange for a "refund" of the purchase price or traded for goods of equal value.
Losses flowing from these and many other similar schemes for cheating a retailer have led to an urgent need to develop a means of combatting such fraud. Of course it is possible to develop sophisticated registers, perhaps printing on more secure paper. However, this can be a very expensive solution. In most cases the retailer has invested significant amounts of money in his present sales record printers and is reluctant to purchase replacement printers at further expense.
The use of paper that is more difficult to obtain will perhaps reduce the problem, but suppliers of such paper would be required to cooperate to ensure that no supplies reached unauthorized hands. This degree of cooperation and security is difficult to achieve in practice and would be unlikely to have long-term success. Sales record paper is conventionally supplied in a roll of several feet in length. One stolen roll can therefore be used to print a very large number of fraudulent records.
It is clear therefore that there exists an urgent need for a method of reducing the ease of counterfeiting sales records that can be readily adapted to existing equipment. Because the stores targeted by operators of the schemes described above tend to operate on low margins, it is desirable that a successful method should involve minimal extra expenditure on the part of the retailer. It should, however, be flexible enough to permit variations that will enable the retailer to stay ahead of any attempts to defeat the system.
These objectives and others are met by the method of the present invention which provides a low cost, but effective technique for maintaining the integrity of current sales records providing systems.